Killing Severus Snape
by MuseDePandora
Summary: Voldermort killed Snape once. Hermione killed him twelve times. And she’d keep doing it until they got it right. H/S. EWE.
1. Chapter 1

**Killing Severus Snape**

By MuseDePandora

**Disclaimer: **Harry Potter is the brainchild of J.K. Rowling and thus belongs to her and whomever she sells the rights to, which is not me in this case. This piece of fanfiction is written with the admiration and respect of Harry Potter's creator. I claim no ownership of her creations. No profit is or will be made from this material.

**Summary:** Voldermort killed Snape once. Hermione killed him twelve times. And she'd keep doing it until they got it right. (H/S. EWE.)

**Rating: **T, suitable for teens 13 and older.

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Lord Voldemort killed Severus Snape once.

Tonight, Hermione Granger would kill him for the twelfth time in a year.

"Bloody buggering hell!" she yelled, stamping her feet, pulling on her hair, and generally making a fool of herself. Severus watched her dispassionately from across the room. He finished his dinner as if this were any other night. She tried to ignore him to hold onto a few more minutes of anger. Soon the despair would sink in. Then the moon would set. And it'd start all over again.

They now had this down to almost routine.

"It should've worked!"

He rolled his eyes.

"No, I mean it this time. This should've worked!" She pulled on her hair once more for good measure. "I have no idea what went wrong."

"It certainly wasn't the potion," he drawled.

She glared at him. "Thank you, Severus. I know that. We're still missing something." Hermione looked at the rows of books surrounding them in Number 12 Grimmauld Place's library.

"You won't find it there."

She huffed. He was right. Suddenly, the despair was just there, setting into her bones and pulling her whole body down like a lead weight in her core. She was so heavy.

"Sit down."

She did as he told. Hermione tucked herself in the old, Victorian couch in front of the fire. She pulled her knees up to her chest and bit her lip. He set a calming drought in front of her. Tears filled her eyes at the evidence that he had anticipated their failure. She wouldn't drink it now. She'd save it for later.

He always did this. Despite the fact that he was going to end the night murdered –_again_!-, he was the one that held her together. She wasn't quite sure why. If anyone had the right to rage, it was him.

"We will start over in the morning," Severus said, finishing his meal in the chair to her side.

"It's the transfiguration element." She was already running the arithmantic symbols through her head. "We need Headmistress McGonagall."

Severus scoffed. "The day Minerva involves herself in blood magic is the day I become Head of Hufflepuff."

"She might do it for you."

He made a sound almost like a laugh. It was far too joyless and skeptical for such a distinction.

"I have," she whispered.

That caused him a slight pause. "Yes," he said slowly as if she were a first-year again, "but you have most obviously gone mental, Hermione."

She ignored him for a while and stared into the fireplace. Her eyes overlooked the bright oranges and white, focusing on the bud of blue at its base. She focused on that one seed of spark. It reminded her of that single elusive element that she wasn't sure they'd ever catch, the root of life itself. Perhaps it was impossible. Sometimes, she wondered if she'd finally crossed over into playing God. It was hard to tell with magic. She couldn't create life, she knew that, but she could try to steal and resurrect a single ember of it.

At the moment, they could only borrow it.

"How much longer can you stand this, Severus?"

He snarled in her direction. "What? No more Gryffindor promises of just one more time?"

"I haven't made that promise for months."

"Thank Merlin." He set his plate aside on the table in front of them. She banished it to the kitchen. Severus leaned back in his wing-backed armchair. The angles and hallows of his face created pools of light on his forehead, nose, and lips. Beneath his eyes and in the curves of his cheeks, the shadows elongated. He didn't look alive, but not yet quite dead.

Others would have just seen Severus Snape. Hermione saw an amalgamation of man and memory.

There were times where she seriously doubted her sanity.

Perhaps he really wasn't there. Perhaps she was alone, speaking to walls. Perhaps she was the one who died.

Then he looked at her. His eyes were alive. They were bright and brutal and so very, very clever. He saw her and knew her, made it all real for her. She sold a little bit of her soul every new moon and killed even more, just to keep his eyes so sharp.

Every month of life she gave to him, took two from her.

She could've lived with that.

But she had to kill him every time to do it.

He had noticed her staring. "Well, let's get on with it then," he snapped.

Hermione nodded to herself silently for a minute before finally summoning the strength to rise to her feet. He moved to the space in the middle of the room cleared for this purpose. She followed him. Hermione wanted to be close enough to catch him if he didn't make it to his knees this time. Despite the fact that they both knew what was coming, the reality of it could still catch them by surprise. Severus faced her, hands held behind his back, spine straight, chin raised. He was the epitome of wizard power and restraint. He looked her in the eye. She swallowed and raised her wand.

"_Sectumsempra_."

Hermione left him on the floor to die.

Like she always did.

-

A/N: I'm unsure whether to make this a one shot or continue with it. Please let me know what you think.


	2. Chapter 2

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2.

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They awoke together.

They always did.

The day after she killed him and spelled her own blood into his veins to revive him, they shared a peculiar symbiosis. She knew from reading that this was normal. That is, as normal as something so unnatural could be.

The magic in her blood hadn't yet had time to recognize the difference in bodies. For some time, it would only know him as an extension of her. If her timing was correct, and everything depended on it, than his magic would grow and that symbiosis would be lost. If she did that part wrong, then he'd simply be a body. His magic and everything that had made him Severus Snape, that infinitesimal second of life she had been nurturing and trying to grow for over a year, would be lost. That was the stuff of her nightmares, because then she'd be connected by dark magic to a breathing, soul-less corpse.

It had to work.

This deep quiet told her it did.

For one more month.

Their hearts beat in stolen synch. They breathed in tandem on the cold, hardwood floor. At least it was clean and smelled lightly of lemon and sage. Hermione had spelled away his blood hours ago. She had been very careful with how she had shed her own. After all, there was barely enough in her body for both of them. Their lives depended on her meticulousness. Apart from quantity, there was also the matter of quality. Blood turned bad so easily. It was best to work in as sterilized an environment as possible when it was involved. She learned that from her parents. In a way, dentistry had prepared her for the basic practices of dark, forbidden blood magic. Oh, the things one learned in a muggle home.

She giggled.

He glared.

Already, that heady sense of power and belonging began to ebb.

"Eggs and bangers?" she asked the air in front of her face. She still didn't have to look at him to see his facial expression. She knew he frowned. Instead, she watched the dust motes flutter and glitter against the shadows of the ceiling. There was a cobweb up there that she'd been meaning to banish for at least six months.

"_Your_ eggs?" Severus returned dryly. "Is it necessary to kill me again so soon?"

Hermione laughed because she'd long since become accustomed to his humour. It could be dark, yes, but she'd come to understand that sometimes, it was the only appropriate kind.

"Careful, Severus." She raised herself up on her elbows. Her head felt like a boat turned upside down. He stayed unmoving to her side, her feet at his head and his likewise to her. That likely did not help her regain a proper sense of equilibrium. "Keep whinging about my eggs and I just might."

He scoffed. "You wouldn't dare."

"You're right," she muttered, rising up on her hands and knees before trying her feet. For a moment, she was in the yoga position of Downward Dog. They'd long abandoned general concepts of dignity. "I just Hoovered in here." Technically, an _Evanesco_ and _Scourgify_ but this was a running joke of theirs. It was something unexpected that they had in common, a muggle past.

He tried to kick her.

Hermione was on her legs too quickly for that. Still, he almost tripped her. That was precisely why she rushed herself on her feet. She wanted to get to her wand first. After all, he had a very particular sense of humour and she didn't want to spend the next three days without a mouth. It made eating so difficult.

"I'm making eggs and bangers," she announced to the room. "Then I'm reviewing the transfiguration runes. Maybe I should contact Professor Sinestra about the timing. And Professor Babbling about the runes. I'm sure it's the runes. But if we change the time, we'll have to change the runes anyway. This could change all my calculations. I will have to contact Professor Vector again."

"Please, let's contact everyone at Hogwarts while we're at it."

She ignored him. "We need the Headmistress."

"No."

"But if-."

"No."

"Severus. _Really_."

"Yes, _really_, Miss Granger. Must I remind you that we only continue this _experimentation _as long as everything meets with my permission?"

She replied with silence. He found his feet with grace and purpose, as if he'd been laying on the floor out of boredom and nothing else. She hurried to grab her wand first.

The fire had died soon after Severus. It was so cold Hermione could see their breath. She wiggled into a jumper. Severus was examining the symbols she had spelled into the walls and floor hours before with _Flagrate_. The spell was near its end and they were now little more than moonlight in the corners. This was where it failed; she was certain. The symbols pulsed in the dark room from every magnetic pole. In that moment, she hated them.

She shivered and Severus threw a fire into the hearth.

"Make your lists, Hermione," he ordered so that it would sound less like a favour.

This was a hard pause in time for her. Once she got going again, she'd regain that certainty they both needed; the idea that _this time_ it was going to work. However, the day after new failure, she went to pieces. He told her what to do and incited her temper so that she wouldn't turn maudlin. He understood what she did: she had the will and he the direction.

It worked for them.

It was the only way it'd work.

She had to believe it'd work.

"I'll make the lists," she said to the empty room. He was already in the kitchen cooking the eggs and bangers. She pulled out her scrolls and got back to work. It was the runes; she was certain of it. It had to be the runes. It was so hard to combine them with transfiguration elements. She had to contact Professor Babbling. Then Professor Vector. No, Professor Sinestra first . . .

They needed Headmistress McGonagall.

This wasn't going to work.

-

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	3. Chapter 3

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3.

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Severus was going to kill her when he found out.

"It is unfortunate that no one can ever know about this, Miss Granger," McGonagall said from the middle of her office. The old headmistress sat in a leather wingback chair with Hermione at her feet. It seemed about right for the situation. However, Hermione was down there because she did not have arthritic knees and it was easiest to lay out all her notes on the floor around them. "The way you have combined potions with transfiguration runes could open up an entirely new branch of magical medicine. If it didn't involve blood sacrifice, you could've won another Order of Merlin for this. Certainly, there could've been a Lufkin Medal of Magical Excellence."

Hermione frowned at the notes blocking them in. "I'm not doing this for any medals, Professor." Though that didn't mean it didn't sting. Hermione had secretly fantasized about winning a Lufkin since she was twelve and first learned about it. Gryffindors dreamed of winning an Order of Merlin. Ravenclaws aspired to the Lufkin. She wouldn't have turned her nose up at the prospect of having both.

"I'll be satisfied if we simply don't end up in Azkaban over this," Hermione mumbled.

"Hear, Hear." McGonagall pointed her wand at a pile to their right. Three rolls of parchment floated into her lap. "I know you believe the weakness to be in the runes, but I cannot help but think it might be in the potion."

A chill ran up and down Hermione's spine. "Oh! Don't let Severus hear you say that!"

McGonagall nodded with a grim smile. "He was only a man. It's possible he made a mistake. Even Albus made them." The headmistress seemed to pause in thought. "Of course… It is also possible that Severus made no mistake but the potion is still wrong."

Hermione shook her head without even thinking. "That makes no sense."

"What I mean to say, Miss Granger, is that perhaps…" McGonagall seemed to rethink what she was going to say. She pursed her lips like Hermione had seen her do hundreds of times before giving out a detention in class. "Perhaps Severus did not mean for you to succeed."

"Of course, he does, Professor. If we do not, he dies. No, even worse! Every time we don't succeed, he has to die all over again. It is a living hell for him."

"Precisely."

Her professor sounded so sure that Hermione's bones went cold. It made a twisted sense. She had gone over every other element, from the basic incantation down to the orientation of the planet, and could not find the fatal error in her calculations. She had checked and rechecked the stars and the quality of her own blood. She had investigated Greek runes, Egyptian runes, even Mayan runes and woven the most powerful ones into transfiguration spells that she had only read about in theoretical papers that McGonagall had published fifteen years before. The one element that she had never doubted and thus never checked was the potion. She remembered her father quoting Sherlock when she was a child. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

"Why would he do that?" she whispered.

"Severus always had a martyr streak in him," McGonagall said with a strange sort of affection. "It was his own sort of nobility. This self-sacrifice. It made him a perfect spy. No one really liked him, himself included. In everyone's plans, he was always supposed to die, Miss Granger."

Hermione's eyes began to sting. She wasn't sure why. She was angry. She felt betrayed. She was heartbroken. She was a dozen different things. Most of all, she was exhausted. "Then why wouldn't he just kill himself while I'm sleeping one night? Why all this fuss and bother?"

McGonagall sighed and rubbed her temple. "To be honest, I think he always thought that death was too good and easy for him. He always wanted to suffer. He always thought he should."

"Please, professor, stop talking about him in the past tense. He's not dead yet. Well," Hermione said, "he's not dead at the moment."

"Yes," McGonagall said, "and perhaps we're doing no favors for him there. Have you considered that, Miss Granger?"

The fire in the hearth, almost too warm on her back, sputtered as a log cracked. There was a magical clock somewhere in the room, tick-tick-ticking. The past professors in their portraits snored and shuffled, impersonating various little life-noises that no portrait in her mind ever really had the right to make.

No, Hermione had never considered whether or not Snape wanted to die. Perhaps she was too consumed with whether or not she could undo it. She was that insufferable little know-it-all, too overcome with the how-do-I to wonder about the should-I.

That was not the point. When she first revived him that morning in the Shrieking Shack, he could have told her then that she was wrong. It would've been his right to tell her to go bugger off and then take back his rightful death. She wouldn't have understood it, but could have respected it.

But a year! For a year, she had devoted herself to him and saving his life. No one else might have thought him worth it, but she thought they owed him that little chance. That was her reasoning in the beginning. Then it grew on itself. After the first time, if he died, it would've been her fault. She couldn't count how many nights that thought kept her awake. Her conscience was wrapped in with his fate in knots.

It was more than that.

She had threatened her freedom for him. Hermione risked Azkaban. She had asked Harry for his home, taken advantage of his trust.

She had done terrible blood magic of which the wizarding world didn't even quiet understand the ultimate cost. Some said that it weakened the soul and magical core of a witch or wizard. Others said it damned them to Hell. No one really knew. It certainly cost her some longevity. To give him a year of life, it had taken two from her.

It had started with guilt and perhaps hubris. Then it was conscience. Yet, then it became something like friendship. She thought there was understanding, trust, and a common goal. She thought he respected her sacrifice.

Perhaps she was too wrapped up in her own motives to see his.

"I'm going to kill him," she said, finally deciding to focus on her anger because it was the least complicated. "I mean it this time."

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